Professionals support O’Connor’s “breast is best” view. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that in cases where premature infants cannot have breast milk from their mothers, they receive donated mothers’ milk instead. Lactation experts and AAP pediatricians also favor breast milk for all babies, with the AAP guidelines promoting exclusive breast-feeding until 6 months and ideally until age 1.

Not everyone can successfully breast-feed their own babies. But there are all sorts of casual and informal breast milk sharing networks.

Meanwhile, the near-universal promotion of breast-feeding, which is raw mothers’ milk, by organizations like the AAP does raise a question about why the same group is so unequivocally opposed to raw animal milk that it advocates a federal ban.

At almost the same time that O’Connor was announcing her mothers’-milk bank, the AAP was issuing a statement endorsing “a ban on the sale of raw or unpasteurized milk and milk products throughout the United States.”

The New York Post recently reported that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is going to be a first-time grandpa when his 30-year-old unmarried, equestrian daughter Georgiana gives birth this coming winter. The mayor’s spokesman told Page Six that Bloomberg “is thrilled and can’t wait to meet his first grandchild.” Nice that he’s so eager, but if your dad was the Nanny of New York City who’d spent the past decade banning “bad” habits and mandating “healthy” behavior, you might have a bit different perspective. Imagine a conversation between daddy and daughter regarding the pregnancy. It might go something like this:

D: I know you take care of yourself, but haven’t you been following my effort to stop New Yorkers from eating too much sugar? Fruit juice, yogurt, granola? You know how much added sugar those things have? Recent studies have shown that sugar is so “toxic” you might give birth to a baby prone to obesity if you don’t watch out.

G: OK, dad.

D: Remember what I said at the press conference when that stupid judge overturned my soda ban? “I’ve gotta defend my children, and you, and everybody else and do what’s right to save lives…Obesity kills.” Lay off the sugar, ok?

G: OK, Dad.

D: What about other meals?

G: I’ve stopped eating fish because of the mercury. So I’m eating hamburgers and steak for the red meat and lots of hard, pasteurized cheeses.

D: That’s too much salt, darling. Don’t you remember my former department of health chief Thomas “sourpuss” Frieden? He’s now director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and he says that almost a million people a year die from heart attacks and strokes due to overindulging in salt. They don’t actually have proof that salt is directly responsible for all those deaths, of course, but it is obviously really, really bad to eat too much salt.

G: OK, Dad.

D: Georgie, the news says you aren’t taking any time off from horseback riding for the baby.

G: Yes, dad.

D: Well, if you aren’t going to take time off, how will you exclusively breastfeed? I’ve been working very hard to force mothers into breastfeeding by putting formula under lock and key at city hospitals. I’m doing that because breast is best! Just like my Latch-On NYC campaign says, mothers can save their newborns from diabetes, obesity, ear infections and protect their immune system with breast-milk. Formula is basically poison.

G: OK, dad.

D: OK.

G: I do have a question for you?

D: Shoot.

G: I know you and mom are divorced but you were married when Emma and I were born and I’m just wondering whether you think it would be better for the baby if I were married to the baby’s father [my boyfriend, fellow equestrian, Argentinian-born] Ramiro [Quintana]?

D: Sweetheart, you know that I love and support you no matter what you do right?